"This has a long history, and sometime when you have a lot of time, I will tell you about it,'' Mayor Mark Boughton said to more than 50 people who turned out for the event. "We got here and we're excited about it."

The project has been a vision and a need for a decade and a challenge for at least half of that time.

Principal Anna Rocco said Boughton promised more than six years ago, when she became principal of Roberts Avenue School, that she would have a new building.

"How blessed I am to have the staff I have, and now we have a building to match the level of pride we have in our students,'' she said.

The city added portable classrooms to Roberts Avenue School some 20 years ago. But as space needs grew in the school, which was built in 1953, so did the nearby Midtown campus of Western Connecticut State University.

WestConn wanted to reclaim Roberts Avenue School, the former training school for students at the then-Danbury State Teachers College.

For several years, the city and the state negotiated the sale of the school building before reaching a deal in 2002 for the city to sell it to WestConn for $3.3 million.

As part of the deal, WestConn had to transfer about seven acres on its Westside campus to the Danbury school system for a regional magnet school. That school is open and operated by the city school system.

Rising construction costs led to a small downsizing of the school's design, but the project was well under way when it faced a major problem last summer.

The city found contaminated soil containing unacceptable levels of lead, arsenic, mercury and other chemicals, as well as bits of brick, asphalt, metal and glass.